Battling cultural ideals of body and image

By Amanda Poppei

According to a baby book on names, people perceive women named "Amanda" as very thin, very rich, and very blonde. I am none of these things. While I might be able to achieve very rich and very blonde with the help of I-banking and hair dye, very thin would be a lot harder. Bone structure is pretty impossible to change, as is my body's misconception that it is in Antarctica and must store fat accordingly.

So why aren't I at peace with that unalterable reality? Indeed, why aren't many Yale women at peace with themselves and their bodies?

The most obvious explanation for our desire for thinness is not exclusive to Yale, or even to college. We are beaten by society, immersed in a culture which demands that women be thin to be considered attractive. Surrounded by movies, TV shows, and magazines that feed a national obsession with being slender and muscular, women give in to the enormous pressure to view themselves within the constraints presented by the bathroom scale.

We are presented with images of bright, successful women, all of whom share their "stay thin" secrets on the pages of health magazines—secrets which range from scheduled work-out times to chewing gum to stop themselves from eating. As much as I would like to say that I won't be beaten—that I don't need to conform to society's standards—it's awfully hard to fight against your culture.

While this culture affects women nationwide, college—and specifically Yale—adds its own edge to the mania. We're here for a reason: we worked hard in high school, we have plenty of ambition, and, most importantly, we're all perfectionists. This hunger to succeed manifests itself not only in our desire to get good grades, but also in our desire to fit into a size four dress.

Clearly, it's not enough to simply recognize the problem of women with low self-esteem; we must recognize the societal problem behind it. Girls aren't born with self-hatred. They learn it as they watch the world around them, a world in which the size of an average woman is 5'4" and 144 pounds and the average model is 5'11" and 115 pounds. We live in world in which department store mannequins are so thin that they wouldn't be able to have children if they wanted to, where children play with a Barbie doll whose proportions would cause her vertebrae to shatter if she attempted to so much as sit up straight.

If this is the kind of world in which we raise our children, is it any wonder that girls' self-confidence begins to plummet by age 11? At younger and younger ages, we teach our girls to aspire to an ideal that is physically impossible for 99.3 percent of the female population to reach (although pre-pubescent boys seem to have no trouble at all). Through manipulative advertising and the images of influential celebrities, we have created a society in which almost every woman feels that she cannot be sexy, attractive, or even powerful without being thin. Saddest of all, women translate their insecurity about their bodies to insecurity in general, preventing themselves from truly thriving.

How can we move past this stumbling block to women's success and allow all women to feel happy and powerful? As a nation, we still have a lot of work to do, and it will certainly not be completed in this century. A few small steps have been made, like the founding of Mode magazine for plus-sized women and the rising stardom of heavier women like Queen Latifah and Rosie O'Donnell, celebrities who make no apologies for their weight and ask that we do the same. But these steps are just the beginning of the long journey to battle the impossible ideals of female beauty deeply ingrained into the American consciousness.

Here at Yale, we also have a lot of work to do. While every woman's struggle is individual and personal, a communal effort to validate all women and reach out to those in trouble can go a long way to building a happy, healthy community.

Amanda Poppei is a sophomore in Calhoun.

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